Story breathes fire on its own epic scale

By Rjurik Davidson

August 27, 2011 — 12.00am

WHEN George R.R. Martin published A Game of Thrones 15 years ago, it was clear he had begun an epic fantasy series on a grand scale. Still, few would have predicted A Song of Ice and Fire would span five volumes yet remain unfinished. Indeed, producing interminable series seems to be a professional hazard for fantasy writers - though, even by the standards of the genre, Martin has made something of a point of it.

In A Dance with Dragons, Martin returns to some of his most entertaining characters. Tormented after betraying his family, Tyrion Lannister, the witty dwarf has fled to the east, where, surrounded by enemies, Daenerys Targaryen rules over a former slave city. With her dragons growing to maturity, she dreams of returning to claim her throne in the west. Meanwhile, at the great northern ice wall, Jon Snow commands a tiny band of defenders against the coming icy winter and the growing army of wights. Snow's crippled brother, Bran, journeys even further north to find the three-eyed crow that has haunted his dreams.

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin.

Like the earlier books, A Dance with Dragons offers us the sort of epic that has made fantasy so popular, descended as much from Robert E. Howard's Conan stories as from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Not only is the book filled with the trappings of fantasy - knights and magicians, dragons and undead wights, sword fights and battles - but the characters are clearly drawn, his style action-driven with unambiguous consequences, perhaps evidence of the time Martin spent writing for the television series The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast.

All this is terrific fun and the books have some fine imaginative writing, especially in those few details unique to Martin's world: the ice wall or the strange diseased ''stone men''. Of all contemporary fantasy writers, Martin manages to appeal to the widest audience, deploying these well-known genre elements with enough innovation to attract a more literary readership.

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Still, Martin's saga lacks the metaphorical muscles of Tolkien or Ursula K. Le Guin, whose heroes (Frodo Baggins and Sparrowhawk) have their doubles (Gollum and the shadow), Jungian archetypes representing the characters' own dark sides. By contrast, Martin's ask to be taken at face value. There are none of the metaphors that link the best fantasy to myth, dreams or surrealist notions of the symbolic.

Of course, Martin can't avoid portraying a world view along with his world and he falls for some of the more gauche elements of the genre. His tale is ultimately about an elite - kings, queens and lords, manoeuvring for power. Even if he surprises by killing off his main characters, this does little more than add a Hobbesian aspect to the tale. For many of his characters, life is nasty, brutish and short. In some of A Dance with Dragons' more cliched writing, they live in a world of ''fire and blood''.

In any case, this is not a stand-alone novel. As Martin struggled with the complexity of his narrative, he divided his fourth instalment in two, not by chronology but by character and geography. Hence A Dance with Dragons' first part runs concurrent with events in its predecessor, A Feast for Crows (which followed events in the south and the west), while its second part moves the story further forward in time. This strange construction seems to indicate that Martin has lost control of his material, not so much as a storyteller - one never feels the narrative is confusing - but in its sheer scale.

A Dance with Dragons is considerably more rambling than the earlier novels in the series. It feels much less like a focused novel with a unified theme than a link in a larger chain. None of this will make any difference to Martin's fans, who will devour it with relish. Martin hardly needed the recent HBO production of his first novel in the saga, A Game of Thrones, to ensure his ongoing success. But the popularity of the TV series alone will certainly reinforce his place as the most successful adult fantasy writer working today.